I didn't watch last night's Republican debate in Miami. Apparently it was a relatively sober affair — there were no penis comparisons, no one called anyone else a liar or a fraud or a con-man, there was hardly even any shouting or interrupting.

But several people have asked for a reprise of the type of analysis that I did back in September to compare Donald Trump's lexicon with Jeb Bush's ("The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", 9/5/2015). So here it is, just for the words used in that 3/10/2016 debate.

First, the overall word counts:

Kasich

3,172

Cruz

3,677

Trump

5,114

Rubio

4,701

All (including moderators)

21,117

For each of the four candidates, I calculated the the "weighted log-odds-ratio, informative Dirichlet prior", using the algorithm described on p. 387-8 of Monroe, Colaresi & Quinn "Fightin' Words: : Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict", Political Analysis 2009. In each case, I used the overall word counts from the debate as the prior, and compared the selected candidate's counts to the counts of the other three candidates, given the weighting prescribed by Monroe et al.'s algorithm:

[(myl) "tf-idf" stands for "term frequency (times) inverse document frequency", a widely-used weighting for document comparison. I presume that in this case the "documents" are the compilations of candidates' texts — the idea is to find the sequences that are most common in a given candidate and also least common in the others.]

AntC said,

[(myl) Indeed. Ditto in the selection of Trump and Bush texts that I analyzed last September ("The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", 9/5/2015). It's pretty consistent. In one earlier debate, The Donald's first-person singular pronouns were about 7.5% of his vocabulary (see here), compared to Obama's typical rate of about 2.1% (see here).

In yesterday's debate, Trump's rate of FPSP use was only 4.3% — still comfortably ahead of his rivals Kasich (3.2%), Rubio (2.5%), and Cruz (2.3%)]

And are all the right-wing commentators jumping up and down about his narcissism?

[(myl) As far as I know, George Will and company have been silent on this point — they don't like Trump, but a white billionaire's first-person-singular pronouns don't inflame their prejudices like a black intellectual's do. I've only seen one minor right-wing commentator take note of Trump's pronoun frequency — and he combined it with a repetition of the false assertion about Obama ("Did a blind squirrel happen to find a nut?", 8/8/2015).]

Also 'I' or other first-person words seem to be amongst the least's for other candidates.

BTW how come 'am' appears for Kasich, but not 'I'?

[(myl) "am" is on the list of LEAST Kasichoid words — his rate for "am" is 0.9%, compared to 1.6% for Cruz, 3.6% for Rubio, and 3.7% for Trump. Kasich's rate of "I" usage is in the middle compared to the other debaters: Rubio 1.6%, Cruz 1.7%, Kasich 2.5%,Trump 3.8%. "I" can be used with lots of other verbs besides "am" :-)…]

Terry Hunt said,

Although I have Rosten's delightful book, it's been too long since I re-read it, so I'd forgotten that one. (The London side of my family has some Jewish connections and almost certainly roots, but as a child I was only ever exposed to the odd Yiddish word.)

I wonder if, in fact, this is the actual origin of the Trump/Trumph family name?

andyb said,

Sorry for jumping in late here, but I just found this post, and it connected with something I've observed but haven't been able to quantify.

It seems like, since Reagan, candidates in both parties have been using the word "America" progressively more often in debates and speeches. And usually the winners seem to use it more than the losers. But this time around, it seems to be the opposite.

Rand Paul was definitely the "'Merica 'Merica 'Merica" candidate this time around, and his nearest competitors were other Republicans who also washed out early. Rubio did a bit of it, but he's gone now. Kasich hails only qualified versions, especially "blue-collar America". Clinton mostly avoids name-checking the country, and when she does, it's negative as often as positive, as in "systemic problems in American society". And Trump seems to be almost superstitiously avoiding the name, saying "we" or "here" or even "you", even when it sounds awkward. Sanders and Cruz would be outliers in any other campaign for how little they say America, but next to Clinton and Trump they seem almost traditional in their America-praising.

So, the first question is, am I right about this? And, if so, does it mean anything? I can guess some reasons for Trump to buck the trend, but it seems odd for the others, especially Clinton and Cruz, who seem like exactly the kind of candidates who'd… well, who'd sound like Obama and W.

As a side note, I think Clinton and Kasich seem to be the ones who mention God the most, by far, which is usually something you hear from the right side of the Republican primaries. Maybe Rubio was afraid to remind people he's Catholic, or trying hard to position himself as establishment-moderate rather than right-wing-base, but what about Cruz?